Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗
- Author: Paul Mungo
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been traced to a series of short stories itten in the 1970s by David Gerrold.
In 1972 Gerrold employed virus theme for a sci-fi potboiler called When HARLIE
Was. HARLIE was an acronym for Human Analogue Robot Life Input Equivalents
computer, which meant simply that the ficional creation could duplicate every
function of the human brain—a sort of mechanical equivalent of Dr.
Frankenstein’s monster. This robot could also dial up other computers by telefone
and reprogram them or modify data. In so doing, HARLIE was emulating a computer
program called simply virus, which dialed up telephone numbers at random. When
it found another computer at the end of the line, it loaded a copy of itself onto
the new machine, which started dialing other comlters to transfer copies of the
program, and so on. Soon hundreds of computers were tied up randomly calling
numbers.
The Virus program was fictional, of course, and simply part of Gerrold’s
convoluted plot, but the concept of a computer program reproducing itself had
been foreseen as early as 1948. In that
John van Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and computer pioneer who had
designed one of the world’s first comruters, quaintly called Maniac, began
theoretical work on what was then thought of as electronically created
artificial life, which he termed automata. He predicted that the reproduction
process for such automata would be fairly simple.
Later, in the 1960s, before the advent of computer games, university
engineering students sometimes amused themselves by seeing who could write the
shortest program that could reproduce an exact copy of itself. These were
called selfreplicating programs, but van Neumann would have recognized them as
versions of his concept of electronic automata.
The first attempts to use selfreplicating programs for something useful were
made at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the late seventies. Two
researchers, John Shoch and Jon Hupp, devised what they called a worm program
to help with the management of the center’s computer network, which linked over
one hundred medium-sized machines. They envisaged the program working
automatically, archiving old files, making backup copies of current files, and
running routine diagnostic checks; they hoped that it would be able to perform
the endless housekeeping tasks that the researchers at Palo Alto were too busy
to keep up with. They named the new program a worm, the two later said, in
honor of their inspiration—another work of science fiction by the English
writer John Brunner called The Shockwave Rider, published in 1975. Brunner’s
book heralded the existence of a computer program, which he called a
“tapeworm,” that reproduced itself endlessly and couldn’t be killed.
Something very similar happened to Shoch and Hupp. Their worm program was
expected to sit quietly on one computer during the day, then emerge at night to
roam the computers in the research center, carrying out housekeeping chores.
Because it worked only at night, skeptical colleagues nicknamed it the vampire
program.
In their first test, Shoch and Hupp left the worm program “exercising” on half
a dozen designated machines in the lab. It wasn’t programmed to do anything; it
was just expected to travel to the designated machines and leave copies of
itself. The next morning, though, when the two arrived back at their office,
they found that the worm had escaped and had rampaged through all the
hundred-plus networked computers in the center. More disturbing it had
reproduced so quickly that it had brought every machine to a halt, seemingly
strangling them by taking up all available space in the computers’ memory.
Worse, when they attempted to restart one of the computers, the worm was
reactivated and proceeded to strangle the machine again. To destroy the worm,
they had to write another program—a killer program. Fortunately, unlike Brunner’s tapeworm, their
program was not indestructible, but Shoch and Hupp later called its behavior
“rather puzzling,” and simply abandoned the experiment, leaving unsolved the
problem of “controlling [its] growth while maintaining stable behavior.”
In the early 1980s a number of computer science students suc-
- ceeded in writing selfreplicating programs for the new Apple II computers.
Joe Dellinger, a student at Texas A&M University at the time, became intrigued
by the idea that computer programs could become modified when copied. He had no
trouble writing a selfreplicating program for the Apple II, even though he
didn’t consider himself a particularly clever programmer. His biggest problem
was in writing a program that wouldn’t cause damage; he was surprised at how
quickly the program could propagate, moving rapidly from computer to computer
by diskette, eventually traveling to machines outside the A&M campus.
Though Dellinger was intrigued by the notion that programs change as they
replicate and travel from computer to computer, there is nothing metaphysical
about it. It is simply a computer error. The longer and more complex a program
is, the more likely that a line of instruction, a command within the program,
will be skipped or altered in the copying process. These tiny modifications
rarely cause problems, but the potential for error is there.
What is more important is that Dellinger discovered that any selfreplicating
program, no matter how benign, carried with it the potential for damage, just
as a fly buzzing about a room carries the possibility of disease. Unlike the
software sold by commercial houses, selfreplicating programs are untested, untried and generally unstable. The changes created when these
programs transfer themselves from machine to machine can cause them to be
damaging, and their very presence on a computer is inherently risky.
Equally intriguing is the speed at which they propagate. In an environment like
a university campus, where anyone has access to any computer and programs are
routinely carried from machine to machine on diskette, they can multiply
exponentially. They are, after all, designed to replicate, so that one copy
quickly becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. Dellinger
found that once let loose, the program’s spread was almost unstoppable.
It was another four years, however, before selfreplicating programs became
“viruses.” In 1983 and 1984 a graduate student at the University of Southern
Califomia named Fred Cohen was experimenting with these programs and, at the
suggestion of his adviser, decided to call them computer viruses. It was a
catchier name, and also became the title of his 1985 doctoral thesis, in which
he offered an explanation of viruses. A virus, he wrote, is “a program that can
infect other programs by modifying them to include a slightly altered copy of
itself.” Further, “every program that gets infected can also act as a virus and
thus the infection grows.” Cohen also indicated that viruses presented a threat
to computer security and could modify or damage data.
The thesis did not break any new ground in terms of computer science: in
essence, Cohen took the known characteristics of selfreplicating programs and
renamed them viruses. The term itself suggests that the programs are created in
some kind of wild electronic biosphere and are capable of spreading incurable
diseases from computer to computer—the high-tech equivalent of the biological
viruses to which they are often compared. The sensationalistic use of the word
would later prove to be fortuitous to computer security experts and have an
irresistible appeal to rogue computer programmers. Though the word was perhaps
chosen innocently, the metaphor was not entirely apt. Computer viruses, like
biological viruses, are spread unknowingly, and they can mutate while
spreading, but they are not created in the same way. Biological viruses are
carried by small, natural organisms, over which man has little control;
computer viruses, however, are simply programs—and computer programs are
written by people.
Cohen’s work quickly attracted attention, not least from a German computer
system engineer named Ralf Burger. At the time, Burger was twenty-six and
living in a small town near the Dutch-German border, not far from the city of
Bremen. Burger became fascinated by the concept of viruses, and in July 1986 he
had succeeded in creating his own, which he called Virdem. It was, to all
intents and purposes, a simple selfreplicating program, but with a small
twist. For Burger, the “primary function of the virus is to preserve its
ability to reproduce.” After being loaded onto a computer, Virdem was
programmed to hunt down and infect other files in the machine. When there were
no more files to infect, the virus would begin “a randomly-controlled gradual
destruction of all files.”
In December 1986 Burger decided to attend the annual convention of the Chaos
Computer Club in nearby Hamburg. The club had been founded in 1981 by Herwart
Holland-Moritz—who prefers to be known as Wau Holland—and is a registered
nonprofit organization. Holland, who was a thirty-two-yearold computer
programmer at the time, set up the club as a hobby; despite the sinister
implications of the name, it was chosen only because “there is a lot of chaos
in the application of computers.” According to the club’s constitution, it is
dedicated to freedom of information.
Since its foundation the club has proven itself adept at organizing media
events, and this ability together with the connotations of its name have given
the group a high profile. Like many clubs, Chaos unites people with a wide
range of interests: there are members who see computers as a weapon for
sociological change, others who simply want to play computer games, those who
want to know how computer systems work, and those concerned with making a fast
buck, legally or illegally. The Chaos members refer
to themselves as data travelers, rather than hackers, but they all share the
same obsession with computers and all vaguely subscribe to a vague notion of
“hacker ethics.” Their own unique understanding of that term is that they have
a mission to test, or penetrate, the security of computer systems. Early Chaos
Clubbers were allied with the VAXbusters, the group that sought to break
through the security of VAX computers around the world. The club’s first brush
with notoriety, though, occurred in 1984, when they broke into Btx, or
Bildschirmtext, an on-line text and information service patterned after
Britain’s Prestel. In 1986 they captured the media’s attention again when,
after the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, they provided
alternative information on contamination levels by hacking into government
computers and releasing the data that they found. Their findings were
sufficiently at odds with official reassurances to make them the darlings of
Germany’s Green movement.
The annual conferences of the Chaos Club were held in Hamburg, always in
December. They attracted the cream of the German hacker community, as well as
observers from throughout Europe and elsewhere; were always well covered by the
media; and, without a doubt, were carefully watched by the local police. Each
conference was given a theme that was designed to excite media attention, and
in 1986 the theme was computer viruses.
Even though little was known about viruses at the time, the conference
organizers hoped piously that the publicity given to the subject would help
dispel myths. The organizers also declared: “The problem isn’t computer
viruses, but the dependence on technology,” and they blamed the writing of
viruses on “bad social condition(s) for programmers.”
The star performer at the conference was Ralf Burger, simply because he had
actually written a virus, which in those days was something of a feat. To prove
that his virus, Virdem, would work, Burger handed out copies to some two or
three hundred interested delegates. He said it would “give users a chance to
work with computer viruses.”
Technically, any virus is little more than a selfreplicating program with a
sting in its tail. This sting, usually known as the payload, is what the virus
actually does to the computer, which is often nothing at all—apart from
replicating, or performing a harmless joke, such as making a ball bounce around
the screen or instructing the
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